Snow, Ice, The Arctic Wilderness

Yellowstone in late May is still incredibly snow-covered.  Entering the east entrance you will pass signs warning of avalanche danger, do not stop next two miles, keep one hundred yards between cars.  (You mean it might be dangerous?)   But you get waterfalls like this:

And boulders sliding down the snow-covered slopes, just to remind you -- do not stop:

And views like this across Yellowstone Lake to the south:

Wild Bill Hickock's Hunting Lodge

East of the park is an inn and restaurant that was originally Wild Bill Hickok's Hunting Lodge -- and which he hoped to use to promote the eastern entrance of Yellowstone.  This is the modern restaurant (good, although somewhat expensive because like all Yellowstone facilities, it is only open six months of the year):

 

And here's the original lodge, still standing, although not in the best of shape inside:

As close to a grizzly bear as Rhonda managed to get, and probably for the best:

Rhonda loves wildflowers, and this place, like nearly all of Yellowstone at this time of year, is awash in them.

 

The Mountains of Wapiti

Here are some of the mountains across from our hotel in Wapiti, Wyoming -- just awesome!

Much of the area east of Yellowstone is breccia, a series of fragment cemented together by ash flows.  It makes it very easy for wind and water to carve fascinating structures:

 

Here you get how the wild rivers have carved canyons:

My wife saw this and saw Edvard Munch's The Scream.  And when she said it, I saw it too!

Elevation Matters

Most people do not realize how high Yellowstone is.  Much of it is above 7500 feet, and even with the improvement of my oxygenation since the aortic valve replacement, I could feel it.  Sun exposure is also substantially increased by the thinner air, too.

Here's a graphic example of the elevation change: water bottles that we partially emptied in the park, after we returned to our hotel room closer to 5500 feet high.

After allowing the bottles to equalize pressure:

Old Faithful Erupts

Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park

Mammoth Hot Springs in the north end of the park, and unlike the Old Faithful area, where everything is bubbling not because it is boiling, here the bubbling is because of carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, I bumped the controls on the Pentax, and I have a bunch of grossly overexposed pictures because of it.  This one came out okay:

Here's a video of the water moving across the terraces, leaving beautiful mineral deposits:

Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep & Moose

The first herd we saw were about where I would expect -- on the side of a hill, high up, and hard to photograph, but eventually we got lucky:

 

This picture here was with the 500mm lens, unintentionally set to 1600 speed.  (This caused problems the next day or two, but I did not realize that I had knocked it from the default settings until much later.)

And here's one that was just trotting along the road, near the east entrance:

A bit farther from the park, we found this moose at the side of the road:

Most Of Yellowstone Lake Is Frozen This Time Of Year

But along the north shore, lots of hot springs and steam vents, both in the lake and just onshore, help defrost it:

And here's a use for the video feature of the Canon, recording both motion and the very loud sound of the steam vents:

UPDATE:

Yes, those steam vents are loud. And they smell very strongly as well, of hydrogen sulfide. (The Canon doesn't have Smell-O-Vision.)

Swans

I shot these with the Canon Powershot, using digital zoom, I think, which may explain the image quality:

These were with the Pentax, but at the extreme edge of what the 100-300mm lens could do:

I should have pulled out the 500mm lens.

Mountain Goats

We Stayed at the Green Creek Inn & RV Park, Wapiti

This was a mistake, not so much because of the Green Creek Inn, as the location.  Like everything about Yellowstone, it was a bit expensive because Yellowstone is barely a six month vacation destination, and prices reflect the need to make your profit in the six months that Yellowstone is readily accessible.

The biggest mistake to staying in Wapiti, which is only about 20 miles east of Yellowstone's east entrance, is that the east entrance is easily an hour from the center of the park, and these are very slow roads.  Wapiti makes sense for one night coming to the park, or coming away from the park, but as a point from which to plan excursions, not so much.

The hosts were very friendly and helpful (including finding a spare charger for my Motorola cell phone).  The area around the Green Creek Inn is quite scenic, including this bizarre log cabin built almost without mechanical assistance, before it killed the builder:

Elk, Bison

Shortly after we entered Yellowstone.

Cow and calf, happily grazing:

 

Yellowstone: A National Park Americans Can Take Pride In

I have not been to Yellowstone since our children were young, and it is still astonishing how breathtaking it is -- and in spite of all the other things the national government does that are sleazy, corrupt, or stupid, Yellowstone is something to be proud of.  The admission charge of $25 is one of the great entertainment bargains of all time.

My wife and I used two different cameras for this expedition: a Pentax K10D with a 28-55mm kit lens (although we made little use of it); some with a 70-200mm Tamron lens; quite a bit with a Pentax 100-300mm lens; and a bit using a 500mm Phoenix lens, for the pictures that you can't get close enough safely to shoot otherwise!

We pretty quickly figured out that it made more sense to use the Canon PowerShot A1400 for everything close.  As long as there was strong sunlight, the Canon did a fine job on landscapes and those wild animals so close that we worried about them ramming the car!  This allowed us to leave the long lens on the Pentax.  In addition, we shot some video with the Canon, and as long as I didn't get stupid on the digital zoom, it turned in some very nice images.

Anyway, we returned with 500+ images and videos, not all of which I am going to show you, partly because I do not have the time, and partly because at least half of all pictures either turned out to be out of focus, badly composed, or out of the range of the lens.  (Remember: a great photographer takes 1000 pictures at least for every masterpiece.)

 As you might expect, my wife was driven just crazy by the little wild animal babies: "the cute-o-meter is in the red zone."  But even before we reached the cute wild animal babies, we were seeing many reminders that the bison have been busy reproducing for the last twenty years, such as this bison with a tracking collar, sensibly using a hard packed surface:

This did not require a long lens!

Everywhere we went: bison babies:

Something that my wife noticed was that the babies were often inside a circle of bisons, rather like the way that musk ox protect their young from wolf packs.  Not surprisingly, she dubbed these "daycare circles."  Although the difference is that the mothers are providing the daycare, not someone else.

I will have more pictures of bighorn sheep, mountain goats, elk, moose, vidoes of erupting geysers, mudpots, etc. over the next few days.